Marxism

Marxism refers to the philosophy and social theory based on Karl Marx's work on one hand, and the political practice based on Marxist theory on the other hand (namely, parts of the First International during Marx's time, communist parties and later states).

Marx, a 19th century socialist philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, often in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, developed a critique of society which he claimed was both scientific and revolutionary. This critique achieved its most systematic (albeit unfinished) expression in his most famous work, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), originally published in German as Das Kapital.

Nevertheless, there have been numerous debates among Marxists over how to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and conditions. The legacy of Marx's thought is bitterly contested among proponents of numerous viewpoints who claim to be Marx's most accurate interpreters. There have been many academic theories, social movements, political parties and governments that lay claim to being founded on Marxist principles.

Indeed, academic theorising on Marxism is so widespread that there are a number of different schools of Marxism in addition to the classical Marxism of Marx and Engels. Similarly, the use of Marxist theory in politics, including the social democratic movements in 20th century Europe, the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries, Mao and other revolutionaries in agrarian developing countries have added new ideas to Marx and otherwise transmuted Marxism so much that it is difficult to define its core.

Classical Marxism

Classical Marxism refers to the body of theory directly expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The term "Classical Marxism" is often used to distinguish between "Marxism" as it is broadly understood and "what Marx believed", which is not necessarily the same thing. For example, shortly before he died in 1883, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers' leader Jules Guesde and to his own son-in-law Paul Lafargue, both of whom claimed to represent Marxist principles, in which he accused them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of denying the value of reformist struggles^[1] . Paraphrasing Marx: "If that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist". As the American Marx scholar Hal Draper remarked, "there are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike."

Classical Marxism can also refer to the second era of Marxism, where an organization known as the Second International propagated the expansion of socialism internationally.

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883, London) was an immensely influential German philosopher, political economist, and socialist revolutionary. Marx addressed a wide range of issues, including alienation and exploitation of the worker, the capitalist mode of production, and historical materialism. He is most famous, however, for his analysis of history in terms of class struggles, as summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." The influence of his ideas, already popular during his life, was greatly broadened by the victory of the Russian Bolsheviks in the October Revolution of 1917. Indeed, there are few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the course of the 20th Century.

Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820, Wuppertal – August 5, 1895, London) was a 19th-century German political philosopher. He developed communist theory alongside Marx.

The two first met in person in September 1844. They discovered that they had similar views on philosophy and on capitalism and decided to work together, producing a number of works including Die heilige Familie (The Holy Family). After the French authorities deported Marx from France in January 1845, Engels and Marx decided to move to Belgium, which then permitted greater freedom of expression than some other countries in Europe. Engels and Marx returned to Brussels in January 1846, where they set up the Communist Correspondence Committee.

In 1847 Engels and Marx began writing a pamphlet together, based on Engels' The Principles of Communism. They completed the 12,000-word pamphlet in six weeks, writing it in such a manner as to make communism understandable to a wide audience, and published it as The Communist Manifesto in February 1848. In March, Belgium expelled both Engels and Marx. They moved to Cologne, where they began to publish a radical newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. By 1849, both Engels and Marx had to leave Germany and moved to London. The Prussian authorities applied pressure on the British government to expel the two men, but Prime Minister Lord John Russell refused. With only the money that Engels could raise, the Marx family lived in extreme poverty.

After Marx's death in 1883, Engels devoted much of the rest of his life to editing and translating Marx's writings. However, he also contributed significantly to feminist theory, seeing for instance the concept of monogamous marriage as having arisen because of the domination of man over women. In this sense, he ties communist theory to the family, arguing that men have dominated women just as the capitalist class has dominated workers. Engels died in London in 1895.

Early influences

Classical Marxism was influenced by a number of different thinkers. These thinkers can be divided roughly into 3 groups:

• German Philosophers including: Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach
• English and Scottish Political Economists including: Adam Smith & David Ricardo
• French Social Theorists including: Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Charles Fourier; Henri de Saint-Simon; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; Flora Tristan; Louis Blanc

Other influences include:

• Antique materialism
• Giambattista Vico
• Lewis Morgan

Main ideas

The main ideas to come out of Marx and Engels' collective works include:

• means of production: The means of production is the combination of the means of labor and the subject of labor used by workers to make products. Means of labor include machines, tools, plant and equipment, infrastructure, and so on: "all those things with the aid of which man acts upon the subject of labor, and transforms it." (Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., 1957, p xiii). The subject of labor includes raw materials and materials directly taken from nature. Means of production by themselves produce nothing -- labor power is needed for production to take place.
• mode of production: The mode of production is a specific combination of productive forces (including the means of production and labour power) and social and technical relations of production (including the property, power and control relations governing society's productive assets, often codified in law; cooperative work relations and forms of association; relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations between social classes).
• base and superstructure: The "base-structure" metaphor relates the idea that the economic relations between people with regard to the means of production forms the basis for a superstructure of ideas, social, religious and political institutions and legal frameworks that is ultimately determined by this basis. For Marx, the base determines the superstructure, though this relationship is not a one way process - it is reflexive, the base determines the superstructure in the first instance and remains the foundation of a form of social organisation which then can act again upon both parts of the base-structure metaphor. The relationship between superstructure and base is considered to be a dialectical one, not a distinction between actual entities "in the world".
• class consciousness: Class consciousness refers to the self-awareness of a social class and its capacity to act in its own rational interests.
• ideology: Because the ruling class controls the society's means of production, the superstructure of society, including its ideology, will be determined according to what is in the ruling class's best interests. Therefore the ideology of a society is of enormous importance since it confuses the alienated groups and can create false consciousness such as commodity fetishism (perceiving labor as capital ~ a degradation of human life).
• historical materialism: Historical materialism was first articulated by Marx, although he himself never used the term. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human societies in the way in which humans collectively make the means to life, thus giving an emphasis, through economic analysis, to everything that co-exists with the economic base of society (e.g. social classes, political structures, ideologies).
• political economy: The term "political economy" originally meant the study of the conditions under which production was organized in the nation-states of the new-born capitalist system. Political economy, then, studies the mechanism of human activity in organizing material, and the mechanism of distributing the surplus or deficit that is the result of that activity. Political economy studies the means of production, specifically capital, and how this manifests itself in economic activity.
• exploitation: Marx refers to the exploitation of an entire segment or class of society by another. He sees it as being an inherent feature and key element of capitalism and free markets. The profit gained by the capitalist is the difference between the value of the product made by the worker and the actual wage that the worker receives; in other words, capitalism functions on the basis of paying workers less than the full value of their labour, in order to enable the capitalist class to turn a profit.
• alienation: Marx refers to the alienation of people from aspects of their "human nature" (Gattungswesen, usually translated as 'species-essence' or 'species-being'). Alienation describes objective features of a person's situation in capitalism - it isn't necessary for them to believe or feel that they are alienated. He believes that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism.

Class

Marx believed that the identity of a social class is derived from its relationship to the means of production (as opposed to the notion that class is determined by wealth alone, i.e., lower class, middle class, upper class).

Marx describes several social classes in capitalist societies, including primarily:

• the proletariat: "those individuals who sell their labour power, (and therefore add value to the products), and who, in the capitalist mode of production, do not own the means of production". According to Marx, the capitalist mode of production establishes the conditions that enable the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat due to the fact that the worker's labour power generates an added value greater than the worker's salary.
• the bourgeoisie: those who "own the means of production" and buy labour power from the proletariat, who are recompensed by a salary, thus exploiting the proletariat.

The bourgeoisie may be further subdivided into the very wealthy bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie. The petit bourgeoisie are those who employ labour, but may also work themselves. These may be small proprietors, land-holding peasants, or trade workers. Marx predicted that the petit bourgeoisie would eventually be destroyed by the constant reinvention of the means of production and the result of this would be the forced movement of the vast majority of the petit bourgeoisie to the proletariat.

Marx also identified various other classes such as the

• the lumpenproletariat:, social scum criminals, vagabonds, beggars" etc. People that have no stake in the economic system and will sell themselves to the highest bidder.
• the Landlords:, as a class of people that were historically important, of which several still retain some of their wealth and power.
• the Peasantry and Farmers:, this class he saw as disorganized and incapable of carrying out change. He also that this class would tend to disappear, with most becoming proletariat but some becoming landowners.

Marx's theory of history

The Marxist theory of historical materialism understands society as fundamentally determined by the material conditions at any given time - this means the relationships which people enter into with one another in order to fulfill their basic needs, for instance to feed and clothe themselves and their families. ^[2]. Marx identified five successive stages of the development of these material conditions.

The First Stage being Primitive Communism - hunters and gatherers with no private property.

The Second Stage is a Slave Society, the beginning of "class society" where private property appears. A few people "own" all the land and everyone else has nothing; these people are slaves working for no money. Slave society collapsed when it exhausted itself. The need to keep conquering more slaves made problems with maintaining the vast empire that resulted, and slave society (the Roman Empire) found itself in a dead end, and was eventually overrun by what it called "barbarians".

The Third Stage is Feudalism, where there are many classes such as kings, lords, and serfs, some little more than slaves. Eventually a merchant class develops. Funded by the merchants' riches, a capitalist class emerges within this feudal society, but the old feudal kings and lords cannot accept the new technological changes the capitalists want. The capitalist are driven by the profit motive, but are prevented from developing further profits by feudal society where, for instance, the serfs are tied to the land and cannot become industrial workers and wage earners. Marx says Then begins an epoch of social revolution (The French Revolution of 1789, Cromwell in Britain, etc) since the political organization of society (or the property relations) is preventing the development of the capitalists' productive forces. ^[3]

The Fourth Stage is a capitalism. Here the profit motive rules, and people, freed from serfdom, work for the capitalists for wages and the capitalist class are free to spread their laissez-faire practices around the world. Laws are made to protect wealth and the wealthy. But, according to Marx, capitalism, like slave society and feudalism, also has failings, inner contradictions, which will lead to revolution. The working class to which the capitalist class gave birth, is the "grave digger" of capitalism. The worker is not paid the full value of what he or she produces. The rest is surplus value - the capitalist's profit, what Marx calls the "unpaid labour of the working class", and the capitalists are forced by competition to drive down the wages of the working class to increase their profits. Marx believed that capitalism always leads to monopolies and leads the people to poverty; the better the free market works, the sooner it will destroy itself.

The Fifth Stage (yet-to-be-attained) is Communism, although Lenin, basing himself on a thorough study of the writings of Marx and Engels, divided this into two stages: first socialism, and then later, communism (Lenin: The State and revolution). By now, the whole process stops and the real problem is seen to have been private property. Now everyone has plenty of private possessions, but no-one can exploit another person for personal gain through the ownership of vast monopolies, etc. Classes are thus abolished, and class society ended. Eventually the state will "wither away" and become obsolete, as people administer their own lives without the need for governments. Few applications of historical materialism, the philosophical system used by Marxism to explain the past progressions of human society and predict the nature of communism, account for a stage beyond communism.

Western Marxism

Western Marxism is a term used to describe a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and Central Europe (and more recently North America), in contrast with philosophy in the Soviet Union, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia or the People's Republic of China.

Schools of Western Marxist thought

Structural Marxism

Structural Marxism is an approach to Marxism based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French theorist Louis Althusser and his students. It was influential in France during the late 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers, political theorists and sociologists outside of France during the 1970s.

Neo-Marxism

Neo-Marxism is a school of Marxism that began in the 20th century and hearkened back to the early writings of Marx before the influence of Engels which focused on dialectical idealism rather than dialectical materialism. It thus rejected economic determinism being instead far more libertarian. Neo-Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and power, to orthodox Marxist thought.

The Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist social theory, social research, and philosophy. The grouping emerged at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) of the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. The term "Frankfurt School" is an informal term used to designate the thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research or influenced by them: it is not the title of any institution, and the main thinkers of the Frankfurt School did not use the term to describe themselves.

The Frankfurt School gathered together dissident Marxists, severe critics of capitalism who believed that some of Marx's alleged followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist or Social-Democratic parties. Influenced especially by the failure of working-class revolutions in Western Europe after World War I and by the rise of Nazism in an economically, technologically, and culturally advanced nation (Germany), they took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions.

Max Weber exerted a major influence, as did Sigmund Freud (as in Herbert Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist synthesis in the 1954 work Eros and Civilization). Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, crude materialism, and phenomenology by returning to Kant's critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on negation and contradiction as inherent properties of reality.

Cultural Marxism

Cultural Marxism is a form of Marxism that adds an analysis of the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society, often with an added emphasis on race and gender in addition to class. As a form of political analysis, Cultural Marxism gained strength in the 1920s, and was the model used by the Frankfurt School; and later by another group of intellectuals at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England.

Analytical Marxism

Analytical Marxism refers to a style of thinking about Marxism that was prominent amongst English-speaking philosophers and social scientists during the 1980s. It was mainly associated with the September Group of academics, so called because they have biennial meetings in varying locations every other September to discuss common interests. The group also dubbed itself "Non-Bullshit Marxism" (Cohen 2000a). It was characterized, in the words of David Miller, by "clear and rigorous thinking about questions that are usually blanketed by ideological fog". (Miller 1996)

Marxist humanism

Marxist humanism is a branch of Marxism that primarily focuses on Marx's earlier writings, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in which Marx exposes his theory of alienation, as opposed to his later works, which are considered to be concerned more with his structural conception of capitalist society. It was opposed by Louis Althusser's "antihumanism", who qualified it as a revisionist movement.

Marxist humanists contend that ‘Marxism’ developed lopsided because Marx’s early works were unknown until after the orthodox ideas were in vogue — the Manuscripts of 1844 were published only in 1932 — and it is necessary to understand Marx’s philosophical foundations to understand his latter works properly.

Key Western Marxists

Georg Lukács

Georg Lukács (April 13, 1885 – June 4, 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic in the tradition of Western Marxism. His main work History and Class Consciousness (written between 1919 and 1922 and first published in 1923), initiated the current of thought that came to be known as Western Marxism. The book is notable for contributing to debates concerning Marxism and its relation to sociology, politics and philosophy, and for reconstructing Marx's theory of alienation before many of the works of the Young Marx had been published. Lukács's work elaborates and expands upon Marxist theories such as ideology, false consciousness, reification and class consciousness.

Karl Korsch

Karl Korsch (August 15, 1886 - October 21, 1961) was born in Todstedt, near Hamburg, to the family of a middle-ranking bank official.

In his later work, he rejected orthodox (classical) Marxism as historically outmoded, wanting to adapt Marxism to a new historical situation. He wrote in his Ten Theses (1950) that "the first step in re-establishing a revolutionary theory and practice consists in breaking with that Marxism which claims to monopolize revolutionary initiative as well as theoretical and practical direction" and that "today, all attempts to re-establish the Marxist doctrine as a whole in its original function as a theory of the working classes social revolution are reactionary utopias."^[4]

Korsch was especially concerned that Marxist theory was losing its precision and validity - in the words of the day, becoming "vulgarized" - within the upper echelons of the various socialist organizations. His masterwork, Marxism and Philosophy is an attempt to re-establish the historic character of Marxism as the heir to Hegel.

Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci (January 22, 1891 – April 27, 1937) was an Italian writer, politician and political theorist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy. Gramsci can be seen as one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, and in particular a key thinker in the development of Western Marxism. He wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. These writings, known as the Prison Notebooks, contain Gramsci's tracing of Italian history and nationalism, as well as some ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory and educational theory associated with his name, such as:

• Cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the state in a capitalist society.
• The need for popular workers' education to encourage development of intellectuals from the working class.
• The distinction between political society (the police, the army, legal system, etc.) which dominates directly and coercively, and civil society (the family, the education system, trade unions, etc.) where leadership is constituted through ideology or by means of consent.
• 'Absolute historicism'.
• The critique of economic determinism.
• The critique of philosophical materialism.

Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser (October 16, 1918 - October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. His arguments were a response to multiple threats to the ideological foundations of orthodox Communism. These included both the influence of empiricism which was beginning to influence Marxist sociology and economics, and growing interest in humanistic and democratic socialist orientations which were beginning to cause division in the European Communist Parties. Althusser is commonly referred to as a Structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation.

His essay Marxism and Humanism is a strong statement of anti-humanism in Marxist theory, condemning ideas like "human potential" and "species-being," which are often put forth by Marxists, as outgrowths of a bourgeois ideology of "humanity." His essay Contradiction and Overdetermination borrows the concept of overdetermination from psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple causality in political situations (an idea closely related to Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony).

Althusser is also widely known as a theorist of ideology, and his best-known essay is Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation.^[5] The essay establishes the concept of ideology, also based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Whereas hegemony is ultimately determined entirely by political forces, ideology draws on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that allow us to meaningfully have a concept of the self.

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse (July 19,1898 – July 29,1979) was a prominent German-American philosopher and sociologist of Jewish descent, and a member of the Frankfurt School.

Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and Freud, Eros and Civilization, and his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man) resonated with the concerns of the leftist student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests, Marcuse soon became known as "the father of the New Left," a term he disliked and rejected.

Post Marxism

Post-Marxism represents the theoretical work of philosophers and social theorists who have built their theories upon those of Marx and Marxists but exceeded the limits of those theories in ways that puts them outside of Marxism. It begins with the basic tenets of Marxism but moves away from the Mode of Production as the starting point for analysis and includes factors other than class, such as gender, ethnicity etc, and a reflexive relationship between the base and superstructure.

Marxist Feminism

Marxist feminism is a sub-type of feminist theory which focuses on the dismantling of capitalism as a way to liberate women. Marxist feminism states that capitalism, which gives rise to economic inequality, dependence, political confusion and ultimately unhealthy social relations between men and women, is the root of women's oppression.

According to Marxist theory, in capitalist societies the individual is shaped by class relations; that is, people's capacities, needs and interests are seen to be determined by the mode of production that characterises the society they inhabit. Marxist feminists see gender inequality as determined ultimately by the capitalist mode of production. Gender oppression is class oppression and women's subordination is seen as a form of class oppression which is maintained (like racism) because it serves the interests of capital and the ruling class. Marxist feminists have extended traditional Marxist analysis by looking at domestic labour as well as wage work in order to support their position.

Marxism as a political practice

Since Marx's death in 1883, various groups around the world have appealed to Marxism as the theoretical basis for their politics and policies, which have often proved to be dramatically different and conflicting. One of the first major political splits occurred between the advocates of 'reformism', who argued that the transition to socialism could occur within existing bourgeois parliamentarian frameworks, and communists, who argued that the transition to a socialist society required a revolution and the dissolution of the capitalist state. The 'reformist' tendency, later known as social democracy, came to be dominant in most of the parties affiliated to the Second International and these parties supported their own governments in the First World War. This issue caused the communists to break away, forming their own parties which became members of the Third International.

The following countries had governments at some point in the twentieth century who at least nominally adhered to Marxism: Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, the USSR and its republics, South Yemen, Yugoslavia, Venezuela, Vietnam. In addition, the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal have had Marxist governments.

Marxist political parties and movements have significantly declined since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some exceptions, perhaps most notably Nepal.

History

The 1917 October Revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin, was the first large scale attempt to put Marxist ideas about a workers' state into practice. The new government faced counter-revolution, civil war and foreign intervention. Many, both inside and outside the revolution, worried that the revolution came too early in Russia's economic development. Consequently, the major Socialist Party in the UK decried the revolution as anti-Marxist within twenty-four hours, according to Jonathan Wolff. Lenin consistently explained "this elementary truth of marxism, that the victory of socialism requires the joint efforts of workers in a number of advanced countries" (Lenin, Sochineniya (Works), 5th ed Vol XLIV p418.) It could not be developed in Russia in isolation, he argued, but needed to be spread internationally. The 1917 October Revolution did help inspire a revolutionary wave over the years that followed, with the development of Communist Parties worldwide, but without success in the vital advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe. Socialist revolution in Germany and other western countries failed, leaving the Soviet Union on its own. An intense period of debate and stopgap solutions ensued, war communism and the New Economic Policy (NEP). Lenin died and Joseph Stalin gradually assumed control, eliminating rivals and consolidating power as the Soviet Union faced the horrible challenges of the 1930s and its global crisis-tendencies. Amidst the geopolitical threats which defined the period and included the probability of invasion, he instituted a ruthless program of industrialisation which, while successful, was executed at great cost in human suffering, including millions of deaths, along with long-term environmental devastation.

Modern followers of Leon Trotsky maintain that as predicted by Lenin, Trotsky, and others already in the 1920s, Stalin's "socialism in one country" was unable to maintain itself, and according to some Marxist critics, the USSR ceased to show the characteristics of a socialist state long before its formal dissolution.

Following World War II, Marxist ideology, often with Soviet military backing, spawned a rise in revolutionary communist parties all over the world. Some of these parties were eventually able to gain power, and establish their own version of a Marxist state. Such nations included the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Romania, East Germany, Albania, Cambodia, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and others. In some cases, these nations did not get along. The most notable examples were rifts that occurred between the Soviet Union and China, as well as Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (in 1948), whose leaders disagreed on certain elements of Marxism and how it should be implemented into society.

Many of these self-proclaimed Marxist nations (often styled People's Republics) eventually became authoritarian states, with stagnating economies. This caused some debate about whether or not these nations were in fact led by "true Marxists". Critics of Marxism speculated that perhaps Marxist ideology itself was to blame for the nations' various problems. Followers of the currents within Marxism which opposed Stalin, principally cohered around Leon Trotsky, tended to locate the failure at the level of the failure of world revolution: for communism to have succeeded, they argue, it needed to encompass all the international trading relationships that capitalism had previously developed.

The Chinese experience seems to be unique. Rather than falling under a single family's self-serving and dynastic interpretation of Marxism as happened in North Korea and before 1989 in Eastern Europe, the Chinese government - after the end of the struggles over the Mao leg